[](http://isitmaintained.com/project/jikan-me/jikan-rest "Average time to resolve an issue") [](http://isitmaintained.com/project/jikan-me/jikan-rest "Percentage of issues still open") []() [](https://discord.gg/4q8E4Gg)
The raison d'être of Jikan is to assist developers easily get the data they need for their apps and projects without having to depend on the lackluster official API, unstable APIs, or sidetracking their projects to develop parsers.
- If `add-apt-repository` is not installed, you can install it by doing `sudo apt install python-software-properties` or `sudo apt install software-properties-common`
Create a virtual host and point it to `/public`. Jikan supports Apache out of the box, you just need to create a virtual host and point it to `/public`, and enable the rewrite module for .htaccess (`sudo a2enmod rewrite`), and configure `/etc/apache/apache2.conf` by setting `AllowOverride None` to `AllowOverride All` for the `/var/www` directory.
When a cache expires, it gets deleted. So if you make a request that has an expired cache, your request will take longer as Jikan has to fetch and parse the new data from MyAnimeList again.
This is a newly introduced caching method to the API, it's what the public API runs on as well. It requires some further setup.
When a cache expires, it does not get deleted. Instead, if you make a request that has an expired cache, a job will be dispatched to the queue which handles updating the cache in the background. Therefore, the request will keep on providing stale cache until the job is complete and the cache is replaced with fresh data.
This method provides zero delay, and is highly recommended if you have immense traffic coming your way.
:information_source: Note: If you're currently running Jikan, you're required to stop it before running the above command. You're also required to clear any cache you've stored as well as anything on the Redis server.
Next, you need to make sure that there's a service looking after the queue. This can be manually done by running a process through `php artisan queue:work --queue=high,low`. You can set the command to run on cron, nohup, etc.
But a recommended way is to install Supervisor and have it handle the queue automatically.
:information_source: Note: `--queue=high,low`; Jikan stores two types of queues; high priority and low priority. This depends on the type of request. You can check which request is considered to be high priority in the [JikanResponseHandler.php](https://github.com/jikan-me/jikan-rest/blob/master/app/Http/Middleware/JikanResponseHandler.php) middleware in the `HIGH_PRIORITY_QUEUE` array.
:information_source: Note 2: Not all requests are queuable. Some are handled the `legacy` way. You can find out which ones in the [JikanResponseHandler.php](https://github.com/jikan-me/jikan-rest/blob/master/app/Http/Middleware/JikanResponseHandler.php) middleware in the `NON_QUEUEABLE` array.
This reason for this is quite simple. User related requests such as anime/manga list can be frequently updated. They're cached by default for 5 minutes (you can change this in `.env`). But if they were to get queued for a cache update, it would take longer than 5 minutes because the update job would have to wait in line. So it skips the queue and is automatically updated on the request. This does mean a slight delay in fetching and parsing the fresh data from MyAnimeList.
- You are responsible for the usage of this API. Please be respectful towards MyAnimeList's [Terms Of Service](https://myanimelist.net/about/terms_of_use)
